The work of my organization, the Vulnerable People Project, is to stand with the vulnerable at their darkest moments. It’s our honor and privilege to bring aid and comfort to these brave people in impossible situations, often when it seems the whole world is eager to move on in the aftermath of some great violation of their dignity and worth.

We’re active in advocating for the Uighurs held in concentration camps by the Chinese Communist Party in Chinese-occupied East Turkestan, the Yezidi, Christians, and other minority communities besieged and assaulted by ISIS and other violent factions throughout the Middle East, and American allies and friends abandoned to the Taliban in Afghanistan after the catastrophic U.S. withdrawal. 

Most recently, VPP has advocated for Palestinians trapped and slaughtered by Israel’s unpopular and corrupt Benjamin Netanyahu regime in Gaza. 

Tens of thousands of women and children—civilians—have lost their lives in Gaza since Hamas’s October 7 attack in Israel last year. And to the horror of a growing number of onlookers, many powerful voices among the political and media classes in the U.S. have not only ignored the carnage, but openly egged it on. Worse, the upper echelons of the Democratic Party’s presidential campaign even vowed to make sure the violence would continue.

So it took tremendous courage for President-elect Donald Trump to stand with the suffering people of Gaza during his own campaign. And when he did so, he also showed courage in standing with the American people in their revulsion for what he calls the “forever wars” of the foreign policy establishment.

Trump has been rock-solid in his consistent advocacy for peace and his outspokenness against war, from the frenzied and disastrous months following the terrorist attacks of 9/11 under the George W. Bush administration to the reckless and thoughtless actions in Afghanistan and Ukraine under the Biden-Harris administration.

Months ago, Trump played a pivotal role in scuttling a bill that fooled more than a few lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. Under the guise of addressing the humanitarian crisis at the U.S. border, the measure would have actually granted huge sums of money to continue (and escalate) the senseless deaths of millions in the Ukraine war. 

Trump took his stand without flinching at the risks, and Democrats punished him with months of false rhetoric claiming his party had proved itself cynical—when in fact it had acted with a preference for peace and a respect for American taxpayers’ good-hearted rejection of U.S.-funded violence.

And Trump also spoke out boldly on behalf of Middle Eastern minority communities in the U.S. during his campaign, promising to stand against “warhawks” like the Cheney and Bush families. Members of both those families, meanwhile, endorsed the Harris campaign—as did numerous pro-war political military brass and intelligence officials with cushy jobs in D.C.

Trump made visits to Muslim- and Arab-majority communities like Dearborn, Michigan, where a young immigrant voter last week called out to him: “Trump, what do you have to say about Gaza?” 

“It’s gotta stop,” Trump answered on the spot. “What we want is peace.”

As CatholicVote reported this week, Mayor Amer Ghalib, a Democrat, of majority-Muslim Hamtramck, Michigan, endorsed Trump in September, citing the candidate’s commitment to peace.

The numbers of Middle-Eastern migrant voters who helped bring about Trump’s victory this week are both historic and a direct result of his advocacy for peace.

On Wednesday, the New York Times reported, “Unofficial results released by the city of Dearborn show that Mr. Trump won 42 percent of the vote in Dearborn, compared with 36 percent for Ms. Harris and 18 percent for the Green Party candidate, Jill Stein.”

In 2020, the Biden-Harris Democratic ticket carried Dearborn with just under 70 percent of the vote, per the Times.

“Ameen Almudhari, a 33-year-old Yemeni-American Dearborn resident, told the Times that he voted for Trump in 2024 after backing Biden-Harris in 2020 due to the foreign policy views of the respective candidates,” CatholicVote’s report continues:

The Times reported that Almudhari “faulted” President Joe Biden “for spending American money to support the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.”

The voter’s 10-year-old son enthusiastically exclaimed to the Times, “Trump will end the war!”

Outside of Trump’s campaign, the picture was much bleaker over the last year.

To judge from some talk by network commentators, from speeches by prominent men like former President Bill Clinton as he stumped for the Democratic ticket, and even from the efforts of certain voices on the political right who hoped to steer the Trump campaign, you might have thought the antiwar movement had disappeared completely from American public life.

During these long months, that movement of solidarity with the vulnerable needed a Thomas Paine. “These are the times that try men's souls,” he might have written just before the last year of the presidential election cycle got fully underway. “The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his vulnerable brothers and sisters in Gaza; but he that stands by them now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”

On the road to his triumphant return to the White House, Trump became that voice. 

Faced with the military-industrial complex and the Washington establishment’s cynical use of Zionism to justify the abject abuse of Palestinians, Trump could have kept quiet. He could have justified ignoring the violence as a political strategy, or dismissed the deaths as a distraction from domestic cultural issues. Instead, he spoke out clearly and definitively for peace. 

Not only that, but he did so in the middle of a last-ditch effort to reclaim the presidency and right the American ship—staking his own fortunes and the future of his country on the claim that all are equally endowed with inalienable, incomparable dignity and worth, including the people of Gaza.

Because Trump seems to understand intuitively something that I and my team at VPP have had the privilege of learning over the years: there is a consolation and honor in throwing in your lot with the vulnerable, and it’s worth far more than all the comforts and assurances you might gain from the world by abandoning America’s foundational principle of solidarity when it’s put to the test.

He understands that America is more itself—and truly made great again—by returning to that principle.

And he has said with Paine: “If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace.”